Are we about to run out of oil

[extrasolar giant]

oil is now $60 a barrell.
how long till we run out & whatill happen then?
my guess is 5 years

[aeolus]

There are varying estimates of when oil production will wane. They range from 20 to 300 years in the reading I've done. I'd say 50ish years is a good estimate, but it all depends on LOTS of variables. And it won't just run out one day. It will be a gradual process of prices climbing, production reducing, and alternatives being developed/instituted.

[ChromeStar]

Hi extrasolargiant/aeolus

50 years or sounds about right, by 2007 Here in south africa petrol will cost roughy double it's current cost of roughly R5 (in rands) so it will end up about R10 a litre.

This really sucks seeing as though this is about the time i'll be able to get a drivers lisence.. ..lol

If you're interested in this kind of stuff visit the links in my signature

[piersdad]

petrol in Newe Zealand is now at a price relative to wages that is 75% of the price it was in the 1980s fuel scare.
the high price will encourage more ambishious search and drilling.
however in 50 years time it will only be viable to use it for plastics and other high cost uses such as lubricating electric motor bearings

[Dave Mitsky]

Perhaps a search using the term peak oil (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil ) will clarify matters. There is a big difference between not meeting world demand for petroleum and running out of the stuff. For more on the topic, see my posts on this thread http://www.universetoday.com/forum/index.p...912&hl=peak+oil

From one of the ads on UT: http://www.mammothresource.com/world_oil_crisis.htm

Dave Mitsky

[kashi]

This site is a little bit paranoid, but it has a few useful facts about peak oil: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/. Wikipedia, as Dave suggested, is probably a bit more objective.

There are a few topics about this stuff on my forum at http://www.climatechange.com.au/forum (plug plug plug).

Kashi

[GOURDHEAD]

Here is a look at what happens from a small ripple in the oil supply.

[piersdad]

just read most of the links
thanks for that folks
I guess ill have to build an electric generating windmill and use it to power my electric scooter
and cuddle up in a warm bed when it gets dark as the power for the lights will be needed to drive to the open air market the next day.

I think the greatest problem is not so much the reduction of oil as the possible collapse of the financial market that is so reliant on the use of oil.
The great depression, befor the second world war, is so far in the past that even at my great age i know nothing personally about it, so todays young generation will tend to blithly ignore the possibility, and consentrate on day to day survival.
recent canceling of the poorer nations debt could be an indication of proactive thinking by the world finacial people.

I am thinking of two scenarios.
young couple both working and as they work in two different parts of the city they have a saloon car and a suv( needed for the rare weekend recreation)
the cost of these two vehicles compells them to both work and as they have 2 children the wife drives the children to school and does the shopping as well as a part time job.

or--
wife stays at home does some part time work near by walks the children to school, and actually talks to them on the way,
husband uses small compact car and this is used as well after work for shopping
and for holidays they use public transport plus hire cars/suv (much cheaper than maintaining two expensive vehicles)

the first scenario uses a lot of rescources and requires both parents to work and as the vehicles will have to be replaced every few years they are trapped in a costly cycle ending in stress and even marriage break up.

the second one the children get the better chance of being great future citizens
the marriage has less stress they will far better placed to survive future shocks in oil or other dooms day scenarios.

Personally I have decided to look very carefully at my own situation and be prepared for most possible future scenarios.
At the moment I have about 16 grand children (last count)and I hope to be able to guide them with words of advise and by example,
so that they will also survive in the future.

[ASEI]

We still have plenty of oil in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, California, Alaska, and all over the ocean floor. The current reserves in the fields that we mine now might run out in 50 years. We're not done finding it, and we still aren't counting shale oil, which we've figured out how to extract. Nuclear coal gassification is another possibility. We probably have over 150 years.

In short, though oil is finite, we aren't done mining it yet. If we ever run into real scarcity, as opposed to scarcity induced by stupid politics, the price will begin to rise, due to increased costs of extraction. We will mine more and more difficult and expensive deposits for it as we go, upping the cost. Eventually, people will begin to shift to nuclear/hydrogen or nuclear/electric alternatives, and production will drop. Then oil will primarily be used to oiling machines and plastic production, things like that.

This much the environmentalists have correct. What I think they have incorrect is that the oil prices today are primarily induced by NIMBY mentality, the increased demand induced by industrialization of formerly poor and starving nations, and environmental restrictions. There are pretty significant oil fields in Ohio that were closed up early in the century because gasoline was too cheap to mine them. They detracted from property value. Nowadays, providing you could fight your way through the legal and political miasma, they would probably be worth quite a bit.

The oil "crisis" will come gradually and eventually. Until it does, there's no economic sense using alternative energy. When it does come, alternatives will be found and driven by market forces, not government intervention. Too many people this past century wanted to force the oil crisis to happen sooner so they could put people into the urban/localized social mold that they wanted them in. These are the same people that cry "supply crisis" at every demand shock and want government subsidies for the alternatives. They also stridently oppose mining oil .

[Dave Mitsky]

Discovery of new oil reserves reached a peak in the 1960's. More and more people are starting to take peak oil seriously. During the past year I've seen articles about it in magazines as conservative as Barrons.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4077802.stm

One of the leading spokesmen on the subject is Dr. Colin J. Campbell. Here's part of an online biography:

"After being awarded a Ph.D. in geology at Oxford University in 1957, C. J. Campbell joined Texaco in 1958 as an exploration geologist in South America, later moving to BP with assignments in Colombia, Australia, and Papua. In 1968, he joined Amoco in New York as regional geologist for Latin America, becoming Chief Geologist in Ecuador in 1969. With the opening of the North Sea, he returned to England in 1972 as General Manager of the Texas independent Shenandoah Oil Corporation, before rejoining Amoco to become Exploration Manager in Norway in 1980. In 1985, he was appointed Executive Vice-President of Fina in Norway. He is now a petroleum consultant and has had commissions from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate; Bulgarian government; European Commission; Amoco; Shell; Esso; Amerada; Mobil; and others. In all, his career took him to Borneo, Trinidad, Colombia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the USA, Ecuador, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Norway."

Those are reasonably impressive credentials, in my opinion.

http://www.geologie.tu-clausthal.de/Campbe...ll/lecture.html

Dave Mitsky

[GOURDHEAD]

Until it does, there's no economic sense using alternative energy. When it does come, alternatives will be found and driven by market forces, not government intervention. Too many people this past century wanted to force the oil crisis to happen sooner so they could put people into the urban/localized social mold that they wanted them in.

I share your opinion expressed in the second sentence. The first sentence causes me great alarm.....like the alarm of the captain of a huge ocean liner who awakens to find it speeding at 30 knots toward a 90 story highrise built on the waters edge and the liner is within 10 yards of collision with tanks nearly full of fuel. It requires quite a bit of energy to produce and transport food and fresh water to our overcrowded and evergrowing population centers. We are not structured to endure several months of greatly reduced energy supplies, not politically, not geographically, not ethically, not sanitarily.

I see the function of the various governments to be that of accurately informing the citizens of each with sufficient information for private enterprise to solve the problem. But then you can lead a citizen to the information but you can't make him think sufficiently thoroughly over a sufficient number of variables to become apprised of the problem nor its likely solutions.

[ASEI]

It's not going to just shut off though. That's what no one seems to get. We'll continue mining oil all throughout the oil crisis. The cost of drilling into harder deposits will cause a gradual rise in the price. We'd probably have 20 years of high fuel costs before it starts turning around. And the free market can turn things around fast: look at our country in 1880 vs 1900 vs 1920.

[antoniseb]

This is not my field, but what I understand to be the issue is this:

We are continuing to slowly increase the amount of oil being produced world-wide, but there is a several year lead-time to drill new wells and otherwise increase capacity.

BUT - we (the world) are continuing to develop industries that use oil in countries that so far have used little of it, especially in China, India, and Malaysia, and demand is rising faster than capacity to pump and deliver.

Basically, the laws of the market place say that without intervention, the price of oil should rise (in the absence of regulation) to just short of the cost of producing energy by alternative means. There are many estimates of what that cost is, but the cost will go down for some alternatives as the scale and maturity of manufacturing improves. From listening to people who may or may not know what they're talking about, I estimate this price to be between $100 and $120 per barrel... but the price is highly influenced by people with a vested interest in estimating the future price to be higher than it really is, so maybe we are at the threshold of creation of alternatives on a bigger scale already (at $60).

I was driving through NW Texas Friday and saw a pretty amazing wind farm near Abeline.

[GOURDHEAD]

Here is a table that gives U.S. energy sources through 2003. I have not seen figures that apply after 2003. Note that fossil fuels supply 86% of the energy and wind only 0.11%. It'll take a lot of windmills to make up the difference. Most likely the alternative source to take up the fossil fuel slack will be nuclear. It takes a few months to bring them on line from design completion and we don't have, so far as I know, a long term solution for the radioactive waste. My fear is that we'll wait for the loud slurping sound emanating from some of the last fields before we take the need for a solution seriously hence the analogy with the large ocean liner--that's a ship son not a leak proofing for the bottom of the ocean.

[ASEI]

Nuclear power is the only way that an alternative fuel economy is going to work. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's just a pain-in-the ***, cryogenic, violently explosive way of storing energy. To produce the hydrogen, nuclear plants are required (unless, that is, you want to burn coal to get hydrogen. Figure out the environmental sense of that) The long term solution to nuclear waste is to stick it in the ground. Nuclear power produces ridiculously small quantities of waste compared to the amount of power it generates, and we have plenty of ground to stick it in. All the garbage generated in the 20th century could go in a mile deep landfill covering one average sized county. Perspective is what is needed on the nuclear industry.

[antoniseb]

Originally posted by ASEI@Jun 28 2005, 02:34 PM
Nuclear power is the only way that an alternative fuel economy is going to work. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's just a pain-in-the ***, cryogenic, violently explosive way of storing energy.

I disagree with the first sentence, especialy the word "only". Though to be fair, there is a huge unresolved issue related to the environmental impact of putting giant solar farms in the deserts of this planet. However, if such solar farms are built, Hydrogen becomes a relatively convenient medium for transporting the produced energy.

[John L]

The current US administration is pushing nuclear hard. There have been no new nuclear power plants in the last 3 decades in the US, while France has built or started 58 nuclear plants. The new Fusion test reactor will now be built in France, too. The problem with Wind and Solar is that it takes up A LOT of land, and there are environmental groups that don't want to cover vast tracks of land with wind farms and solar arrays. The problem with hydrogen is that its waste product after combustion is water vapor, a greenhouse gas far more efficient that CO2 in trapping heat in our atmosphere.

The Peak Oil problem is that demand increases at a rate of about 3% a year, and as has been pointed out, more countries are industrializing and using more oil to run their new economies. At the same time there are no new proven reserves being discovered, and those that are in operation all decline eventually. For nations like Saudi Arabia, they have not released hard numbers of total production and potential yeild for 2 decades, and many suspect that they are already at peak production. There are known fields that are not being tapped, but even if we brought all of them online, they would only offset the loses from fields going past their peak. Oil will come to an end in our lifetimes, and I hope we come up with alternatives before then.

[antoniseb]

Originally posted by John L@Jun 28 2005, 03:23 PM
The problem with hydrogen is that its waste product after combustion is water vapor, a greenhouse gas far more efficient that CO2 in trapping heat in our atmosphere.

The advantage of water compared to CO2 is that it rains and snows out of the air.

[ASEI]

At 300 watts/m^2, which is rather unrealistic efficiency for solar panels averaged over day/night/weather and degrading performance with time. At that rate, it would take thousands of square miles of panels to get the energy to replace gasoline. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself - does a solar panel, in it's operational lifetime, produce the electricity required to make another solar panel? Refining silicon isn't energy inexpensive, and is dependent on combustion processes currently.

If the refridgeration system, or the bleedoff valve fails, your hydrogen car will fail. If the tank undergoing thermal stress, develops a crack, your hydrogen car fails. Experimental hydrogen stations currently use no-spark materials and robotic arms to transfer the fuel, with test engineers watching from behind a concrete wall in case the fuel get's sparked. Hydrogen is dangerous and hard on anything that carries it. That propane plant that caught on fire and exploded recently was quite a show. Imagine if it were hydrogen. Hydrogen is much better behaved if it is chemically bound to something, like carbon or boron. Convenient is about the last word I'd use for pure hydrogen.

Tens of thousands of gigawatts are going to be required to replace the energy we currently get from oil. I don't see anything else working but nuclear.

[antoniseb]

Originally posted by ASEI@Jun 28 2005, 05:12 PM
it would take thousands of square miles of panels to get the energy to replace gasoline.

First, on a large scale, there are more economical alternatives than photo-voltaic for getting solar energy. I've never seen a description of a terawatt Solar Farm that used PV. Usually it is done with mirrors. But even if we assume that we're going to build these things in the desert, so weather is a less important factor, let's call it 200 Watts per square meter. That scales up to 200 Megawatts per square kilometer, or 2 Terawatts for a 100x100 kilometer farm. That's about half the total US power consumption.

It would be easy for Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Chile, China, Mongolia, all to become Hydrogen exporting countries, and for the US to be energy self-sufficient through some large such farms in the desert Southwest.

[Dave Mitsky]

Originally posted by ASEI@Jun 27 2005, 02:00 PM
It's not going to just shut off though. That's what no one seems to get. We'll continue mining oil all throughout the oil crisis. The cost of drilling into harder deposits will cause a gradual rise in the price. We'd probably have 20 years of high fuel costs before it starts turning around. And the free market can turn things around fast: look at our country in 1880 vs 1900 vs 1920.

A careful look at the economic realities of the Hubbert bell curve will reveal the fact that the geologists, energy analysts, and bankers and others involved in alerting the world to the potential dangers of peak oil do indeed "get" it. It's not a matter of there being no petroleum left. When the peak is reached, half of the available supply remains. However, on the downslope petroleum becomes an increasingly expensive and politically volatile commodity. A very small shortfall in world oil production will have disastrous results. During the 1970's, a shortfall of 5% caused oil prices to nearly quadruple. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that warfare will be the result of the diminishing supply.

When drilling for petroleum first began and sweet crude oil was easy to tap, it took the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil to produce about 100 barrels of oil. Today the figure from new wells is approximately 1 barrel for each 8 barrels. When the ratio becomes 1 to 1, drilling oil wells will no longer be economically viable.

There are hundreds of millions of gasoline engine vehicles in the world. Replacing them will be a monumental task and that is only one aspect of the overall problem.

"Improved fuel efficiency in the world’s transportation sector will be a critical element in the long-term reduction of liquid fuel consumption, however, the scale of effort required will inherently take time and be very expensive. For example, the U.S. has a fleet of over 200 million automobiles, vans, pick-ups, and SUVs. Replacement of just half with higher efficiency models will require at least 15 years at a cost of over two trillion dollars for the U.S. alone. Similar conclusions generally apply worldwide."

http://www.peakoil.net/USDOE.html

A new book by investment banker Matthew Simmons has some sobering things to say about the state of the Saudi Arabian oil reserves, the world's largest.

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2574

http://www.thegraphicsstore.com/r-1000/m-B...6X/Default.aspx

Is the peak even closer than expected?

http://www.energybulletin.net/997.html

What does a conservative oilman/politician have to say on the matter?

"By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day." Dick Cheyney, 1999

Dave Mitsky